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Jesus Christ?

@maximara

Put a full stop between "Bethlehem of Judaea" and "In the days of Alexander" instead of a comma. We may now parse the text as implying that Alexander was both a priest and a king (so he could crown himself) and then the "priest-king" line failed in practice because the subsequent rulers were non-Jewish Herod and Roman Augustus, and this failure of the line was repaired by the advent of Jesus who (Epiphanius piously avers) was both priest and King - yea, even Davidic king. Thus Alexander is invoked to represent the time of the beginning of the failure of the line, not the time of the advent of Jesus who would make good the situation, for between Alexander and Jesus lie the mere illegitimate rulers Herod and Augustus.

May I ask you to reflect on the plausibility of this comment you make?
Read in context is is clear that Epiphanius is putting Jesus' birth "in the days of Alexander" and furthermore that Herod the Great came after Jesus.
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But no! Surely nobody is to "come after" Jesus as priest and Davidic king! Herod represents the failure of the succession and then, Lo! the eternal Priest and King arrives in the form of Jesus. The context implies the opposite chronology from the one you propose. What else could the pious Epiphanius possibly be trying to say? That Jesus appeared, the eternal priest and king ... only to be replaced by some non-priestly Edomite usurper? it defies not merely known chronology, but all reason, to suppose that to be the intent of Epiphanius' words.

ETA By the way, I have just noticed in the wiki article on "Jude brother of Jesus" that
Epiphanius of Salamis, in his Panarion, mentions a Judah Kyriakos, great grandson of Jude, as last Jewish Bishop of Jerusalem, that lived beyond Bar Kokhba's revolt.
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That is surely inconsistent with the idea that Jesus, and therefore Jude, lived as early as the days of Alexander Janneus.

ETA 2: From Panarion 3:34
This is the true faith which we have received from the ancients, the faith of the prophets, Gospels and apostles, which our fathers and bishops confessed when they met at the Council of Nicaea in the presence of the great and most blessed emperor, Constantine.
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It is inconceivable that the writer of these words would so far depart from Nicene orthodoxy as to locate Jesus in the reign of Alexander Janneus. See http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/epiphanius.html.
 
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Craig, even if you put a full stop there, or you can parse the "in the time of Alexander" as pertaining to the date when the change happened, as opposed to Christ's birth, like the translation favoured by eight bits does (although that would be strange, since the change happened AFTER Alexander died, not in his time: a new guy didn't come on the throne while Alexander was still on it), but it still says that the normal succession stopped when Jesus was born. So that would make Jesus born at the time Herod took the throne, not half a century later.

The argument that he wouldn't say that because otherwise you'd want Jesus actually on the throne of Judaea, is a strange one, because the same would then apply to any other time for Jesus. But that's not what Epiphanius is really going on, if you read the whole page and understand their theology a bit. Jesus and more properly the coming of the new covenant and all, is merely marking the time when God could change his mind about his promise to the Jews. God promised that all kings would be from David's line, and basically the only moment God can stop keeping old promises is when the new deal comes into effect. And anyway, they'd expect Jesus to be more like ruler of the whole world on his heavenly throne, rather than just king of the backwater province of Judaea.

Precisely BECAUSE Herod was the failure of that succession, he can't come before Jesus, because basically God then failed to keep his prophetic promise. "Repairing" FAILED prophecies after 70 years is not quite what most believers wants to believe. If Jesus is born in between, then basically God didn't fail to deliver, as a king from David's line did come, albeit as king of kings over everything.

Incidentally you can guess that the same kind of reasoning was behind the other guesses. Matthew tries to tie Jesus in with the end of Herod's reign, while Luke (plausibly) doesn't pick that census of Quirinius as a random date, but because at that time the kings ended completely and Judaea was turned into a province directly ruled by a Roman governor. I.e., he doesn't take Herod The Great as a bigger failure than getting a Roman governor instead of a king at all. While for Matthew we can guess that the difference between Herod the Great and Herod Archelaus was that the latter went against Herod's will in taking the throne with Rome's help, wasn't recognized by the locals, and ruled by a short lived reign of terror where everyone hated him. I.e., you know, it's pretty easy to exclude him as the last proper king.

Which is at least my real point: those guys didn't know jack about a real Jesus -- whether the dude may have existed or not -- but were taking guesses based on such "prophetic" interpretations of the OT.

As for Jude and his grandson, well, Christians were known to stretch generations like that and have people of improbable ages (for the time) to claim continuity. E.g., Irenaeus bridges an even greater interval by having just two people who obviously lived long and prospered, so one can learn from the other who in turn learned directly from Jesus.

These guys were propagandists, not historians, so don't expect him to actually know about who was the son of who in that line between the last bishop and Jesus. He's just making up something, which as usual, needs a bit of faith to believe.

As for the true faith... obviously Epiphanius thought he was keeping the true faith, but so did a lot of other people who came up with bigger deviations than a chronology problem.
 
Hans

And generally, if you think the context makes any difference, show how. I'm sick and tired of "but you're taking it out of context" just being a meaningless generic apologist excuse. If any context makes a difference, show exactly what.
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That you are unfamiliar with why cherry-picking is universally frowned upon by scholars is revealing, if unsurprising, but OK, it's surely reasonable enough for you to ask to be shown what can go wrong since you don't already know. Let's take a worked example.

In another thread, similar in overall topic to the current thread, a poster claimed that, according to Mark, Jesus went to his crucifixion in a historically inappropriate purple garment. It is the final sentence of this post

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8627712&postcount=65

Just as you do in the current case, that poster was unable to produce any black-letter writing that says what he claimed, just his interpretation of a passage that says something arguably relevant to and consistent with it (that is, shortly before his execution, Jesus was draped with something that was the same color as clotted blood, purple, as Pliny the Elder described Tyrean purple).

Just as you do in the current case, that poster spun the unexpectedness of the author believing this as something which really happened to be a feature of the poster's larger argument, rather than the bug it is, namely, that it is a clear indication that the poster misread or misleading cited the author. As I'm sure you know, what Mark actually wrote, in between the draping and the crucifixion scenes emphasized by the poster, was that the purple thing was removed and Jesus was given back his own clothing to wear on the way to his execution.

So, yes, Hans, context matters to understanding what an author is communicating, and is crucial when using a text as evidence for some other point. In the current case, your sentence fragment

but after his birth in Bethlehem of Judea the order ended and was altered in the time of Alexander
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does not say that the order ending and the order being altered both happened after Jesus' birth. It emerges that one did and the other did not. The one that didn't happen after Jesus was born happened in the time of Alexander, just as the fragment says. The fragment could have been written more clearly, but then it wasn't written to be read by itself, standing alone. That the fragment lacks clarity when standing by itself is not a license for you to represent the author as being committed to how you choose to disambiguate his choice of tenses. He himself disambiguated his choice of tenses, beginning in the rest of the sentence, which you omitted.
 
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Context matters only if there is something in it that actually influences the meaning. And it's only cherrypicking or taking it out of context if indeed it changes the meaning in doing so. But again, some piece of context must exist that actually does that. It's not just a generic get-out-of-jail ticket for whenever someone can't support their delusional BS, as it has become more commonly used lately in religion-related discussions.

If you claim cherry-picking or taking out of context, you implicitly make the claim that there is something in that context that actually lets you invert (or even change) the meaning of that text to what you claim it says. As with any claim that something exists, it's your burden of proof to support that. Show what piece of the text does that.

In other words, there is a fine difference between actually pointing out that "taking it out of context" actually makes a difference, and being yet another delusional BS peddler bleating it as a meaningless catch-all excuse and substitute for actually having an argument. Now I'm not saying that you are the latter, but it kinda hinges on your being able to do the former.

And, no, handwaving what is wrong with Hans isn't it.
 
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LUyfr.jpg


Sorry, had to post this.
 
Kirk said:
Is there anything written about him from the time when he actually lived?
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The proper way to answer that is as follows: if there exists such surviving documents, they have yet to be found. If you think of HJ as a potential crime scene, any evidence has been tainted or tempered with long ago. Christianity took over the Roman Empire decades after it was founded, and grew from a small cult slowly so finding contemporary physical evidence (be it artifacts or original written documents) about its founding figure is by nature highly unlikely. So whether there is a founding Jesus or a founding Brian (say) who made up stories about some dude named Jesus, there's no way to get a definitive answer, only conjectures based on different interpretations of circumstantial evidence.
 
Jorghnassen said:
The proper way to answer that is as follows: if there exists such surviving documents, they have yet to be found. If you think of HJ as a potential crime scene, any evidence has been tainted or tempered with long ago. Christianity took over the Roman Empire decades after it was founded, and grew from a small cult slowly so finding contemporary physical evidence (be it artifacts or original written documents) about its founding figure is by nature highly unlikely. So whether there is a founding Jesus or a founding Brian (say) who made up stories about some dude named Jesus, there's no way to get a definitive answer, only conjectures based on different interpretations of circumstantial evidence.
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This seems to be the prevailing opinion...
 
So you're saying there's a gap in our knowledge?

Is it big enough to wedge, say, a god into?
 
Beelzebuddy said:
So you're saying there's a gap in our knowledge?

Is it big enough to wedge, say, a god into?
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That's a separate problem (existence of a god also falls into "how does one define god" issue, just like "how does one define historical Jesus" is a problem if you want to answer whether there was a historical Jesus or not). But YHVH (or whatever you want to call the deity of the Jews) is a fiction.
 
Kirk said:
This seems to be the prevailing opinion...
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It is certainly my opinion.

Of the ten or so people that have actively posted in the HJ threads over the years it looks to me like there have been a few people that think the evidence is very strong that an HJ existed.

However, I think that most of those ten or so participants believe either that the answer is unknowable but that an HJ probably existed or that there is not even enough reliable information to sustain a meaningful guess. There might even be a contingent that believes it is probable that an HJ didn't exist.

What I mean by historical Jesus:
1. A single individual who is the prominent character of Christianity.
2. If the facts were known of his life he could be recognized as the Jesus of Christianity.

I think this is roughly the definition that most people have in mind that have participated in the JREF HJ threads.
 
If you claim cherry-picking or taking out of context, you implicitly make the claim that there is something in that context that actually lets you invert (or even change) the meaning of that text to what you claim it says.
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Your analysis omits the case which applies to the current situation. You extracted a sentence fragment from which it is possible to determine only a partial ordering of the complete sequence among three events. When the birth and the alteration happened relative to each other isn't stated in the fragment and requires disambiguation. That is, something besides a recitation of the fragment is needed to determine its complete intended meaning.

Example Suppose that I type, as part of a sentence in a historical essay:

... but after the Civil War began at Fort Sumter in South Carolina American slave commerce ended and was altered in the time of James Madison.

That is a poorly phrased fragment. There are two hypothetical possibilities. Maybe I think that "the time of James Madison" included the Civil War. Alternatively, my confidence that James Madison died decades too early to see the Civil War (1836 and 1861) may have caused me to overlook a hypothetical syntactical ambiguity.

Plainly, I mean that there were changes in American slave commerce over its final decades. "Plainly" because you aren't trying to pass this fragment off as evidence of my ignorance about these events. If there actually was any doubt about what I believed, then the rest of the sentence might help, or the rest of the essay, or other evidence for what I taught about related topics.

In the meantime, the sentence fragment isn't evidence that I think the Civil War coincided with Madison. At best, its intended meaning is a subject for investigation.

You manufactured an ambiguity from what was unambiguous in the original passage, by removing everything except the part that doesn't contradict your story about the author. It doesn't contradict your story not because the fragment affirms what you say, but rather because the reader without other evidence can't determine completely what the fragment means to say.
 
Considering that I actually discussed the whole of 3:3 there, now that's the one of the most dishonest arguments ever.

But at any rate, show what changes the meaning there, if you want to claim cherry picking. Not hypothetical analogies and BS handwaving. Exactly what there changes the meaning to your version? That's what would make it cherrypicking. Extracting the relevant sentence(s) if the meaning stays the same, is NOT cherry-picking and is NOT a fallacy.

Quoth for example The Fallacy Files:

Of course, in some sense, all quotation is out of context, but by a "contextomy", I refer only to those quotes whose meaning is changed by a loss of context. The fallacy of Quoting Out of Context is committed when a contextomy is offered as evidence in an argument.​

Got that? If you can't actually show that the context actually supports a different meaning, then it's not a fallacy, but valid quoting.

The "but you're taking it out of context" without actually showing exactly what other phrase or sentence makes it so, has become the most common excuses of dummy apologists who don't actually have an argument. Whether it's about this or about the bible condoning slavery or whatever, it's the standard way for those believing BS to resolve their cognitive dissonance back to square one.

Presumably because it's so easy to do that BS excuse that it doesn't take any actual knowledge or logic to reach for it, and essentially no limit to where you can mis-apply it. No matter how much you quote, short of the whole damned book, someone can just mechanically call not enough context. I could quote the whole of chapter 29, and someone could still reach for "but you took it out of context!" because I didn't quote 28 and 30 too.

But there is no reason to accomodate such BS-ers, unless they can show exactly what context distorts the meaning. Just mechanically conceding and quoting more and more is just a way to muddy the meaning, because now the relevant parts are lost in a sea of text that is actually irrelevant.

So, again, what context matters there? If you claim it exists, show it.
 
Hans, the passage doesn't say that Jesus was born in or during the times of Alexander. Your misreading is not evidence for anything. That's the only issue, Hans. As I mentioned several posts ago, the entirety of the work was posted by me. Who cares can read it and decide for themselves.
 
"See for themselves" isn't cutting it, when YOU are making the claim that something there is changing the meaning. Then YOU get to support that claim.
 
Whatever you say, Hans. Naturally, I am unsurprised that you would resist the idea that people should look for themselves.

Speaking of burdens of proof, we are discussing your claim that Epiphanius believed that Jesus lived early in the wrong First Century. As we have seen, your claim has no textual support whatsoever. What you read into his writing isn't evidence. What's on the page is evidence. What's on the page is that Epiphanius taught that Jesus lived after Alexander's time.

In any event, this is a discussion forum, and the value of further discussion between us is nil. You have already played the "dishonesty" card, which is the sure sign of a conversation that can go nowhere useful. No matter. There is nothing further to be said on a question that can only be resolved by reading what Epiphanius wrote, which is already available to all who care.

If you have some other evidence of Epiphanius' teaching or beliefs that you hope might back up your claim, then perhaps we could discuss that evidence, but otherwise, this vein has been mined out.
 
Nobody is resisting the idea of people looking for themselves, [SNIP]. I'm just resisting the idea that you can pawn off your burden of proof for your claims.

In fact, I'm not even sure if it's dishonesty or sheer irrationality, as there is no dichotomy between your supporting your claims and other people reading the text for themselves. It's utter nonsense to pretend that insisting on one is denying the other.

Also, throwing around "as we have seen" and "it has no support" is yet another lame attempt of yours at peddling your BS. No "we" haven't seen that. Just pretending that something is supported doesn't make it so, and just ignoring all I wrote about that text doesn't mean I have no support. You don't get to just retreat in your alternate world in which everything about the debate is inverted, and magically be right.

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When all is said and done, I think that the quote from Epiphanius is largely irrelevant. He seems to have had a rather confused view of history. What's most important about it is that any historical Jesus likely only served as a framework upon which to hang a plethora of legends and myths.

I happen to think there was a historical Jesus. However, if it turns out there wasn't , I can't say it would matter that much to me. The material in the gospels is largely a mix of recycled material from the Jewish scriptures, allusions political / apocalyptic situations, pagan myth and Greek literature. I would say that the historical Jesus, assuming he existed, had an apocalyptic worldview, preached a gospel of renunciations of material goods, was a messianic pretender and was put to death by the Romans as such - along with many other messianic pretenders. End of story.
 
Well, there's that. Epiphanius was not just confused about history, but even about the sects in his time. He actually managed to start the ball rolling to having Origen declared anathema in the next century while being pretty up front that he only heard second hand rumours about what Origen's supposed followers are supposed to be believing in. And he's not even a good apologist either.
 
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